Category: science

Why Understanding Dreams Matters

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What’s the big deal with dreams, and why is it so important we figure it out? Well, because when we dream, our brain is doing something. So, what if what it’s doing is helping or hurting us? The science behind dreaming—especially the physiology and how it relates to health—is a subject we just don’t know a whole lot about.

The topic of dreams has been a hot one for so many years you can trace it back to Ancient Greece, where they thought dreams told the future. The beliefs about dreams are numerous and range from ridiculous to plausible, including:

  • Dreams are a manifestation of the unconscious (show of hands, Freudians)
  • Dreams stimulate problem solving
  • Dreams help process negative emotions
  • Dreams are the collecting/discarding of brain trash (that’s very unjustly put, I admit)
  • Dreams consolidate short term memories to long-term memory
  • Dreams are a byproduct of neural impulses

Etc., etc., etc.

You see where I’m going with this? So, who’s right? Put your hand down, Dave, you don’t know the answer. There is no answer. Part of the reason for that is because it’s brain-stuff. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say more, but I will. Of all the sciences, neuroscience is probably the one top ones where the least amount of answers have been discovered. And that’s not a slam on neuroscience—for which I have a deep love—it’s a testament to the human brain.

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  • brain-1921600_640
    Which is both wonderful, and poisonous when eaten!

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Why Memory Consolidation is so Appealing

The theory of dreams being a byproduct of memory consolidation/processing makes very good sense to me, despite the nay-sayers. Part of the reason I’m so attached to this theory is because I can see it working. Take the elements in this dream I had, for instance:

  • I was fresh out of college and the only job I could get was as a manager of a local supermarket
  • I had crippling student loans
  • I had just come on shift when there was a zombie outbreak, so I had to lead my employees to safety
  • I had to run to my car to retrieve my revolver

That dream was both awesome and hilarious. It’s one of my favorites. I am also planning to write a book about it, so hands off my dream! Now, compare the dream elements with my reality:

  • When I was fresh out of college, I worked a retail job where I was in management
  • I have slightly less-than-crippling, although no less daunting, student loans
  • I had been marathon-watching Ash vs. The Evil Dead the day/evening before the dream
  • I keep a pistol in my car (this is a judgement-free zone)

This ability to connect dream elements with real world elements gives me the proof I need. But, you’re not me, so I don’t know if the same holds true for you.

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    This was in one of my cookie comas. The Keebler elves did not fare well.

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Why All the Hubbub About Dreams?

Many people still believe that dreams mean something, whether it’s the expression of the unconscious mind or symbolism of what one might be stressing over, looking forward to, etc. And, if you fall into that category, that’s fine. Remember, judgement-free zone.

Learning about dreams—both causes and the result of REM sleep deprivation—can also lead to additional information on such mental health issues as depression, migraines, and the development of mental disorders. I want to note here that, in some cases, REM sleep deprivation has been shown to improve the state of depressive patients.

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  • cat-1609555_640
    I can feel the happiness seeping in!
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No matter what you believe dreams to be or not be, mean, or not mean, I’d like to think that we can all agree on this: The more we discover about the nature, physiology, and effects of dreaming, the more ammunition we may have against some types of mental health issues. And that, my friends, would be a beautiful thing indeed.

Concerning Reality

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In 2005, an article regarding the importance of visual input vs auditory input in relation to spatial information gathering came out of Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology. I hope that sentence was as fun to read as it was to write. To get us started on this topic, I want to throw a vocabulary term at you: visual capture. In the aforementioned article, visual capture is described as what happens when “our localization of a stimulus based on nonvisual information is ambiguous or conflicts with visual localization of the same stimulus, [leading] our nonvisual percept of location to sometimes draw to the visually identified location.”

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  • model-car-2076724_640
    Maybe the longer she looks at it, the more it will make sense.

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Break it Down

This article that I keep blabbing about is called “Why Seeing Is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds.” In it, the authors state that scientists traditionally attribute the dominance of visual capture as reflecting an inherent advantage. The article argues this: “Visual capture occurs not because of any inherent advantage of visual circuitry, but because the brain integrates information optimally, and the spatial information provided by the visual system happens to be the most reliable.”

That’s not to say visual input is always dominant. Optimization is the key point the authors are trying to make, so while visual input is optimal for spatial information, auditory input is optimal for temporal processing.

The authors give a simple, explanatory description of visual capture of auditory space. The short paraphrasing of it is this: If you’re sitting in front of the TV watching a poorly dubbed movie, it’s likely that by the end of the movie you will perceive a synchronization of what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. The longer this auditory misalignment goes on, the greater the chances that your brain will sync the audio to the visuals for you. So, why are we syncing information by what’s on the TV screen instead of what’s coming from the speakers?

“The reason that visual information should dominate space perception,” the authors explain, “can be appreciated intuitively: visual spatial information is exceptionally reliable and precise.” I just want to note that this is likely less true for the visually impaired. Because visual input is generally more reliable where spatial information is concerned, it becomes the favored (and overriding) input format.

The authors of this article conclude that there are two possibilities for visual dominance in spatial information:

The brain could have evolved to depend more heavily on visual stimuli than on auditory stimuli, regardless of the stimulus conditions, or the brain might weigh information in proportion to its reliability and integrate it in a statistically optimal manner. Results from psychophysical studies support the idea that perception, at least, uses the latter strategy.

Speaking of perception…

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  • street-sign-141361_640
    It really depends on what was in the glass to begin with.

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Our Sensations may Seem Accurate; Our Perceptions are not

In a special edition of Scientific American, Sharon Guynup wrote an introduction about how illusion distorts our sense of perception. After learning how vital visual input is, this seems pretty acceptable. Guynup explains that, “Our brain—not our eyes—is the final arbiter of ‘truth.’ We are wired to analyze the constant flood of information from our senses and organize that input into a rational interpretation of our world.”

Illusion disrupt this process. Two of the contributors to the special Scientific American issue, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik explain: “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

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  • child-1439468_640
    Nope, I can’t see you.

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So, if we perceive truth from the optimal stimulus input mechanism, but our perceptions are not accurate, on what do we rely? What is an illusion, and what is simply misaligned information?

Discovering Power

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Science is similar to a good book. You latch on to a subject and study it and every time you blink, there’s something new—new research or studies, new medicines, new therapies, new technologies, new, new, new. It’s like opening Ulysses, reading the word “contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality,” and coming up with a new meaning every time. Don’t pretend that’s not your new favorite word.

Over the past decade and a half, there have been scientific breakthroughs in medicine and technology that seem like—or at one point were—science fiction. Isn’t that fantastic? Can the same be said if we move a bit over to the more fantastical side of sci-fi?

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  • beer-1979263_640
    My dreams are getting closer to reality!

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Well sure, because…

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There is a New Method to Levitate Objects

When I learned this, my first thought was, “There are already levitation methods?” followed closely by, “Jean Grey, here I come.” Right. So, the two means of levitation that physicists were utilizing previously are magnetic levitation and optical levitation. As the names imply, these forms of levitation have their limits—magnetic to magnetized items and optical to objects that can be polarized by light.

Frankie Fung and Mykhaylo Usatyuk, third- and fourth-year UChicago undergrad physics students respectively, must have wanted more. The two led a team of researchers to figure out this new levitation technique, which utilizes a warm plate and cold plate in a vacuum chamber. The way the technique works is:

The bottom copper plate [is] kept at room temperature while a stainless-steel cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen serve[s] as the top plate. The upward flow of heat from the warm to the cold plate [keeps] the particles suspended indefinitely.

As Fung, the study’s lead author, describes it, “The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation. We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects.”

The goal of this research, of course, is not to find the answer of how to mimic telekinetic ability, but to explore its usefulness to space applications and “for the study of particle dynamics and interactions in a pristine, isolated environment,” according to the research team’s paper. But, as with any progress in science, third parties can use the research and technique for different purposes.

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  • energy-hog-704502_640
    Nothing about this is right.

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In a 2008 article in Discover Magazine explaining the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics, Sean Carroll says that “there are only two long-range forces strong enough to influence macroscopic objects—electromagnetism and gravity.” Electromagnetism is limited and impractical, but gravity? That’s getting much closer, considering Fung and Usatyuk’s research.

And, that’s not the only thing giving us a potential look into X-Men remastered, because….

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Scientists are Delving into the Mysteries of Time Perception

Time perception is tricky business that scientists currently just have no answers to. It’s a subject being pursued by both journalists and scientists. Maybe one of the most useful pieces of information is that the brain’s clock can be easily swayed by anything from emotion to illness. Take tachypsychia, for example: A perceptual slowing of time during high stress situations. This afflicts many military personnel, first responders, and pro-fighters.

Then there was a series of five experiments done at University College London by Nobuhiro Hagura. Hagura found that our ability to process visual information speeds up as we are preparing to move.

What if we knew what parts of the brain—all signs point to multiple locations—work toward time perception and learned to manipulate our ability to speed up visual information processing? Could we stop time within ourselves long enough to solve problems or figure out a reactionary plan to a bad situation? Could we manufacture a drug we could give to others that would induce in them a stopped-time scenario while we moved about with impunity for the duration the drug was active?

Maybe. The possibilities are endless.

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    Not that endless.

Body, or Brain?

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I try to keep on top of trending topics. Short of that, I just shoot for interesting. I think this blog post hits both areas. Let’s get real: When is talking about health (read: diets) not trending? Never? Correct! So, answer these questions:

  1. Would you change your lifestyle to better benefit your brain or your body?
  2. Can you do both?

If your answer was anything other than, “I don’t know, RJ. Tell me more!” then think again! I’m going to tell you more! You see, I’ve always heard, read, and been told by personal trainers that consuming food every three hours or so—whether it’s three meals and three snacks or six small meals, really however you want to break it down—will boost metabolism and is better for your body. From a fitness or weight loss aspect, anyway. And, for years, I understood this to be basically universally agreed upon. Then, I watched Neural Stem Cell Researcher Sandrine Thuret’s presentation in the TED Talks series.

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  • animal-1239332_640
    But… I was just about to get my meal prepped!

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Neurogenesis

So, for those of you that may not be interested in researching neurogenesis, I’ll give you the short of it. Dr. Ananya Mandal, M.D., breaks down neurogenesis in this way:

The term neurogenesis is made up of the words “neuro” meaning “relating to nerves” and “genesis” meaning the formation of something. The term therefore refers to the growth and development of neurons. This process is most active while a baby is developing in the womb and is responsible for the production of the brain’s neurons.

The development of new neurons continues during adulthood in two regions of the brain. Neurogenesis takes place in the subventricular zone (SVZ) that forms the lining of the lateral ventricles and the subgranular zone that forms part of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus area. The SVZ is the site where neuroblasts are formed, which migrate via the rostral migratory stream to the olfactory bulb. Many of these neuroblasts die shortly after they are generated. However, some go on to be functional in the tissue of the brain.

Evidence suggests that the process is key to functions such as learning and memory. Studies have shown that new neurons increase memory capacity, reduce the overlap between different memories, and also add information regarding time to memories. Other studies have shown that the learning process itself is also linked to the survival of neurons.

That was written back in 2014, before Thuret’s presentation. Now, we can be fairly confident that spacial recognition could be added to Dr. Mandal’s list of key functions aided by neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is good, is what I’m saying. And it’s something that you can control, to a degree, through diet, anaerobic exercise, learning, sex, sleep, etc.

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  • “I can already feel my brain getting bigger.”

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So, where does the body vs brain question come into play, you ask? Well, neurogenesis and fitness have…

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Conflicting Views About How and/or When to Restrict Calories

The one thing both neurogenesis and fitness (or weight loss) tips have in common is cutting calories. But, they differ in the how and when of it. As I’ve mentioned, fitness/weight loss tips—such as those from Livestrong and other fitness industry mouthpieces—glorify the grazing method. A method, I might add, that has little to no scientific basis, and thus is not the basically universally agreed upon theory I had thought. Don’t believe me? Ask the NY Times. Don’t believe them? Well, how about Nutrition.org?

It is generally the calorie cutting sometimes paired with grazing that is favorable. The same calorie cutting is desirable to aid in neurogenesis. In a blog published by Stanford University, the argument for dietary restriction (only eating about 70% of the total daily intake) is made. Here’s where we start getting our conflict:

[Dietary Restriction (DR)] is a drastic strategy: it takes tremendous willpower to limit calories to 70% of the normal diet. Furthermore, DR is difficult to implement properly; there is a risk of starvation if the diet is unbalanced, which can have wide-ranging consequences. Luckily, similar effects to DR have been found in mice by simply increasing the amount of time between meals.

Similar results by increasing time between meals, you say? Ok, cool. Let’s explore that further by looking at an article from the journal Neural Plasticity. This article explores the role of diet on neuroplasticity (also called brain plasticity). What we want, specifically, is the role of spacing out meals and how that affects neurogenesis. According to the article:

Many studies suggest that Intermittent Fasting (IF) results in enhancement of brain plasticity and at cellular and molecular level with concomitant improvements in behavior […] Furthermore, the effects of IF following excitotoxic challenge associated with lower levels of corticosterone, lead not only to decreased hippocampal cell death, but also to increased levels of hippocampal BDNF and pCREB and reversal of learning deficits.

“But RJ,” you might be saying. “What does neuroplasticity have to do with neurogenesis and where have my underpants gone?” Well friend, I can’t help you with that second part, but here’s what I’ll do. I’ll give you a wee bit of an explanation as to why I included the neuroplasticity bit. Neuroplasticity mainly concerns the strengthening of new or different pathways (or connections) in the brain. That’s an extremely unjust way to describe it, but it’s the simplest.

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  • Pictured: Excited neurons.

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Neuroplasticity and neurogenesis go hand in hand. Phosphorylated cAMP response-binding element protein (that’s pCREB) promotes brain-derived neurotropic factor (that’s BDNF), “which induces neurogenesis, especially in the hippocampus,” according to Ethan Rosenbaum. “As a result, mice with decreased levels of pCREB or any other promoter of BDNF have decreased spatial navigation skills and decreased memory retention […] due to the neuronal death in the hippocampus.”

Spacial navigation? Memory retention? By God, those are products of neurogenesis! Are you following the cycle? I hope so, because I refuse to hold your sweaty hand. So, which would you change your lifestyle for? Brain, or body?

Well, I sure hope your answer was “both.” Because you can do it.